Lin-Manuel Miranda Was a Bar Mitzvah Dancer

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Lin-Manuel Miranda

Lin-Manuel Miranda, everyone’s favorite person, could have danced at your bat mitzvah (if your celebration was in the mid-2000s in Boston or the tri-state area).

Yes, really.

The Hamilton creator tweeted that he found his planner from “the lean years of 2003-2004,” when he was dancing at bar mitzvahs to help pay his rent. “$400!” he writes in the planner. (In a reply tweet, he says his share of the rent was $460.)

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“I was literally one of those guys who shows up in a black satin shirt and tries to get kids and old people to dance. It was bleak,” Miranda told the New York Times in the vows column describing his wedding.

Miranda joins other famous celebrities who got their start at bar mitzvahs, like Tiffany Haddish, who explained she nearly killed an old Jewish man while dancing at one:

Or like Paul Rudd, who was a bar/bat mitzvah DJ (there’s video).

“When he moved to Hollywood to get into acting, he continued to DJ at weddings and bar/bat mitzvahs on the weekends to earn some extra cash,” Uproxx writes. “Despite the unbridled enthusiasm he put out there, Rudd says he did not actually enjoy DJing bat mitzvahs, and he felt like ‘a bit of a douche’ trying to get a bunch of kids to socialize on the dance floor.”

This wasn’t Lin-Manuel Miranda’s only journey into the Jewish world. In college, he sang in Hebrew in a Jewish a capella group called the “Mazel Tones.” He re-tweeted a video (that has since been deleted), adding, “Oh dip my old hine ba hashalom solo,” referencing his part singing the Israeli song “Hinei Ba Hashalom.”

At his own wedding, Miranda performed a rendition of the classic Fiddler on the Roof song, “To Life”:

He also brought the actresses who played Tevye’s daughters in the Fiddler on the Roof broadway revival to perform in #Ham4Ham, the mini-performances Miranda used to put on outside the Hamilton theater:

All this is to say: Just close your eyes and imagine Lin Manuel-Miranda, Tiffany Haddish, and Paul Rudd all at the same bat mitzvah party. You’re welcome.

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